Chapter Eighty-Seven: Shelter Repairs, Part One

A layer of ice had formed over the shelter’s entrance, likely shattered loose by the tremors; now it lay in scattered chunks on the ground, gathered again into an uneven mass of frozen crystal.

Seeing that heap of ice, something flashed through Jiang Huan’s mind.

“The lock’s frozen solid. Smash it and take a look.”

Outside the shelter stood a heavy sliding iron gate. Once it was forced open, the way inside was clear.

“How come there’s a flyer about growing plants here... Huh? Look, there are water bottles, work gloves, and a few bags of cement too. Could someone be living in here?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. If someone were inside, wouldn’t they have tidied this trash away?”

Bai Weishuang glanced around. “It’s probably not inhabited. Look at the branches nearby—none of them show any sign of being broken off. Unless this person could predict the disaster with perfect accuracy and had already prepared enough fuel, how could these dead branches have been avoided?”

It matched Jiang Huan’s own thoughts. She had also noticed that the ice chips were unnaturally clean, and there were no footprints around them.

Hearing this, everyone went inside. Jiang Huan did not stop either. No one knew when the shaking might start again, so they had to settle in first and think about the rest later.

She took out a flashlight, a blindingly powerful one, with dozens of bulbs packed tightly into a single mold. The moment it was switched on, the light was simply astonishing.

At night, it could turn midnight into broad noon.

When she produced it, everyone stared in disbelief. Not only in the apocalypse, but even before it, none of them had ever seen such a thing.

Jiang Huan explained once more, “I used to be a blogger who explored abandoned places and stayed in haunted houses. I prepared the kinds of things people in that circle usually carry.”

“Oh, I see. I hadn’t seen you use it before, but I really have never come across anything like this. A flashlight with that many bulbs—there are so many strange things in this world. Still, it must drain power fast, right?”

As she walked, Jiang Huan answered that the battery was nearly dead. She had brought it out for emergencies and safety, because “we’ve never been inside a shelter before, and we don’t know what might be hiding in the dark.”

Only after everyone had gone deeper inside did they begin to sense that this place was different.

“I thought it would be pitch-black in here. I never expected there to be emergency lighting.”

“Those switches and all that probably aren’t even connected. Otherwise the lights should be fine.”

“We’ve been walking in here for so long—why is our breathing still normal? It doesn’t feel stifling at all.” Though not as good as outside, after walking for more than ten minutes, they still did not feel the slightest discomfort.

“When it was designed, they must have considered ventilation, emergency exits, power supply, and so on. Maybe there are speakers too.”

Still, as they walked on, everyone could not shake a faint unease. They saw no traces that anyone had ever lived here, and the deeper they went, the clearer their footsteps became: tap, tap, tap, as though they had entered a separate sealed chamber.

Along the way, they came across several iron-locked doors, like the ones seen when passing through tunnels.

“Looks fine. I haven’t seen any serious flooding. Let’s split into pairs and check the place out, find the emergency exits, and see whether we can pry open those iron doors.”

The shelter had originally been designed for refuge, but the frozen apocalypse had arrived too suddenly and too fast, and this remote place—less convenient than the cities for gathering supplies—was never most people’s choice. It was no surprise that no one had taken it over.

For Jiang Huan, the obvious choice was her younger brother.

She also had a small flashlight, truly tiny, not even the size of a palm, but it was enough for basic lighting.

Just when their lighting tools were insufficient, Bai Weishuang stepped forward and, from her backpack, actually pulled out two bottles of alcohol, fashioning makeshift torches on the spot.

Jiang Huan counted: including herself and her brother, nine others had followed her, making eleven in all. That meant four pairs and one group of three. After splitting up, Jiang Huan and her brother stayed close together, exploring the shelter step by step with utmost care.

The place was enormous—two or three times larger than the biggest parking garage in the city mall—and it even had two branching corridors. One led directly to another sturdy side door. The group checked it together; it could be opened, and there was broken ice on the other side, though it cleared away with little effort.

The several locked doors all had laughably flimsy locks—those yellow-bodied padlocks from the nineties, the sort with thin clasps. A few hacks and they fell right off.

They pushed the doors open cautiously. The air inside was not as good as outside, but opening the doors for ventilation solved that. To their surprise, some boards were stacked there, and in two small rooms they even found lighting controls. The bad news was that the bulbs had not been replaced for who knows how long. Not only was the illumination weak, but it also crackled now and then, as though it might fail at any moment.

Everyone inspected the place thoroughly, even finding an old lever for drawing underground water, but it had been frozen stiff and would need repairs.

In truth, this situation might not be any better than the base.

At the very least, the facilities could not compare, and with only eleven people in such a vast place, repairs and cleanup would take far longer.

Jiang Huan tallied everything. There were six locked little compartments, but two of them were connected to each other. In the deepest part of the shelter, a hollowed iron gate enclosed a space of a little over forty square meters. Beyond that space lay a passage about a meter wide, leading straight to the exit.

The group gathered to hold a brief meeting and divide things up.

Jiang Huan wanted the connected pair of rooms. If they blocked off the middle, she and her brother could have their own small space while still being able to look after each other.

“The largest room with the side door can go to Xie Congzhou and the others,” she said. “After all, we agreed in advance that he’s good at reading the weather and knows how to farm. Keeping them won’t be a loss. Of course, if we wait a while and they still haven’t come, we can use it for something else.

“The forty-square-meter area can be reinforced at the locks and used as a storage room for supplies in the future. That leaves three rooms. Look—we can split them by gender for now, set aside one as an infirmary, and Bai Weishuang can stay inside it. If anyone has objections, speak up now.”

Liu Ling wanted a separate space with her husband, but although the place was large, it was full of turns and corners, with many sections lacking doors. Everyone was used to sleeping in rooms with doors; otherwise it felt too unsafe, and there was nothing to block the wind.

Bai Weishuang spoke up. “There are only three women—me, Meijuan, and Sister Liu Ling. How about this: Meijuan and I can share one room, and Sister Liu Ling can stay with her husband. A married couple sleeping apart just doesn’t feel right.”

Liu Ling looked at Bai Weishuang gratefully.

Those words could be said by others; if she said them herself, it would feel embarrassing, as though she could not live without a man.

Seeing that no one objected, Jiang Huan followed the suggestion and arranged for Liu Ling and Wang Ping to share one room. Still, both of them knew it would not be proper for a married couple to occupy an entire space by themselves, so they said that if anyone had things to store, they could keep them in their room.